In 1995, in the sixth issue of the Ethical Spectacle, I published a long-imagined project, An Auschwitz Alphabet , which was an alphabetical compilation of excerpts from thirty or forty books about the Holocaust (memoirs and histories). The first three entries were "Arbeit Macht Frei", "Block 10" and "Clothing and nakedness". The purpose of the exercise was to immerse myself in the Holocaust and to understand it, and then to present what I had learned. As a Jewish person, I of course did all the reading and writing with the knowledge that if I had been a cheerful, committed, hardworking and somewhat egg-headed Jewish lawyer in Berlin in 1934, who chose not to leave, I probably would have been an inmate in Auschwitz myself, a few years later.
Something I don't believe I knew (though, I say immodestly, my analytic skills are rather good), was that there were two kinds of Holocaust experts: those who, often unwillingly, but rigorously committed to logic and Epistemic Exactness, would acknowledge that a genocide was happening in Gaza; and those who regarded the Holocaust as unique, a one-off, something which was done to Jewish people, but, as such could never be imitated, repeated, done BY Jewish people.
I have written many times since the 1990's about one of my formative experiences as a child: wondering what the essential difference was, between a Southern sheriff knocking a Black family's home down with a bulldozer, and an Israeli soldier bulldozing a Palestinian home. The clear answer-- no ambiguity-- was: None whatever. Yet this epiphany was accompanied by a sort of strange nervousness, a (pardon the cliche) Emperors' New Clothes sensation: If the parallel, the unity of the two bulldozers, was so obvious, why was I the only one who saw it? When the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers were found in Mississippi in 1964, the liberal, middle class, Democratic Jewish parents of friends and friends of my parents gnashed their teeth, grabbed their checkbooks and made donations, if not to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, than at least to ACLU. But, last week, when Awdah Al-Hathaleen was murdered in the West Bank, I am morally certain that many of the descendants of my parents' set, with whom I have lost touch, are still responding that it is different than the murders of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, but "you haven't lived there. You couldn't understand".
Imagine that I built a concrete trough, sixty by twenty feet; filled it with cats; didn't feed or water them; and then alternately shot at them from my porch, and threw in flaming torches.
Then when you visited me, with no premonition as to what you were going to see, thinking I am a normal, moral person, I casually invited you to participate in the fun. "Would you rather fire the shotgun or throw a torch?" You exclaimed: "Oh my God, you are killing defenseless kittens!" My response: they have basically impossible personalities and several of them bit or scratched me.
After a day or so of thinking through this parable, I was concerned by the implication that the two central characters are human, and the creatures in the trough mere animals. Here is how I solve it: the story is set in the world of Animal Farm, and the two interlocutors are pigs.
When I tried to rewrite it using all human characters, I had two somewhat adjacent reactions: instead of preserving the detachment of a parable, it felt like a sadistic fiction, an account of a murder committed by Hannibal Lecter; but also it seemed I was writing the story of Gaza, not a parable about it.
OK, so how is my Fiery Cat Trough different than the Warsaw Ghetto? Answer: It isn't.
Here is entry M from the Alphabet:
Musselmanner (Moslems) was Auschwitz slang for people near death from starvation and privation. (Lifton, p.38; Levi, Survival, p. 88). The exact derivation of the phrase is not known, but it was common to all concentration camps.